Project Timberwolf - Firefox for AmigaOS4.1

[Fab]

Ok, this is off topic but IMHO, supporting shared objects was one of the best new features I've seen from a developer perspective. Existing library/interface methods just don't seem to have what it takes to support shared C++ code. Without them, you end up having to static link C++ object code, making your executables huge.

However, shared objects on OS4 are technically *not* shared.

[Fab]

BTW, to all the people claiming we don't really need it since we have OWB, FireFox 3.5+ brings a lot of cool stuff to OS4.x that OWB doesn't, including:

* HTML5, presumably including cool stuff like the video tag
* A download manager
* A really good address-bar history system
* An excellent selection of plugins (a lot of which should be cross-platform)
* Private browsing
* Better security features

- OWB/Webkit supports HTML5 and

[Fab]

Dunno what they smiley's for. They still have their uses. They save hard disk space, bug fixes in shared objects don't require all apps that use them to be recompiled, and combined with dlopen/dlsym are a very handy way of making C++ based plugins.

Like itix said, it's an heresy to rely on a C++ interface in general (shared object or not), since it can break at each gcc release. For the rest, i think it's just pure lazyness to use shared objects instead of a shared library.

In OWB, I implemented a shared library-based version of the plugin system and it wasn't particularly harder, and it's quite more amiga-like too (the irony).

[Fab]

Does any port of OWB to Amigoid systems support this?

I'll implement in the MorphOS port, at least.

The OS4 OWB port has a reasonable address bar history, but the Firefox 3.x one is better. Is the OWB MorphOS one as good?

Hard to say. At the moment, the OWB MorphOS one shows a sorted by date/name list with favicon/url/title, popping up for autocompletion if needed. But it can always be improved for sure.

Who says the Friedens couldn't? The GUI is not the hardest part of a browser, but if you get a GUI that hundreds of people already work on, thats a bonus.

It's not really about difficulty but time and motivation. In MorphOS, porting the basic OWB layers such as thread/IO/memory/network and so on took about one week (these layers being more or less the same as the ones needed for Firefox), but the GUI itself is still always in development after more than 7 months (and there's still much to do). So I perfectly see the point in getting for free an already fully functional GUI.